Series of posts over the next few months to say what I’ve found works and what doesn’t in SEO. So this is installment 1 in Top SEO Tools I Use.

So this is somewhat of a product endorsement piece but its also worth sharing with others what you’ve found useful and hopefully they’ll let you know what they have found useful. So Tools I use and even a few I don’t and why.

No the first tool has NOTHING to do with keywords but more importantly everything to do with deciding what your keywords are … if you think my life revolves around keywords you really need to catch up. Backlinks and anchor text are the hardest things to control and often the most impactful. Consider….back in the 2000s Miserable Failure was backlinked to George W Bush’s White House biography page by so many websites that he ranked number one on Google for Miserable Failure. Now I guarantee his site had NO SEO or optimization for Miserable Failure but he held that spot until a counter wave of links went to Jimmy Carter. Then Google manually shut the term war off. Its backlinks that make or break a sites ranking.

You can optimize all day long on content choices and keywords but if the rest of the world doesn’t think you are that in their links neither will Google. So the product is essential. It trends your links and competitors and its just $25 a month. Here are screenshots I have taken from time to time to include in reports to clients.

Notice the colored circles at the top break down the links and provide you with metric like CF TF and DA. Below that image you can see link by link and the strength of each link as well as no follow or follow status.

Below are more links since the site added more features. Under the status column the G shows if its indexed by Google with green as good and indexed, yellow as not indexed but not out right banned and finally red … the worst link and honestly its like being caught hanging out with the wrong crowd. Google even allows you to “disavow” the red Gs.

Image above trends you backlinks, your traffic and your keywords. This graph is also why I dont mind nofollow links and I believe they do affect ranking. Notice the tower of purple nofollow domains that linked to us when I released a news story. The orange keyword position swings up from 90 to 50 as the new position.